"My hook into poetry and its wider implications was when I discovered a copy of Allen Ginsberg's Howl in the basement bookshop of the SPCK (that's the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge). No idea what it was doing there but it cetainly revolutionized what I did. Turned me to Kerouac and Henry Miller and then Miller's long lists of books I should read and then the whole Beat Generation thing leading on to Concrete poetry and the Liverpool Poets in the UK. "

"Poetry is a formalization of the linguistic activity in which everyone is involved all the time, and ideally it should be available to all who feel a need to express themselves in that manner so as to reflect on their imaginative engagement with life. Perhaps that isn't very clear, but if you think of Heidegger's famous dictum, "Man dwells poetically," that indicates that poetry is not primarily a specialized activity, but fundamental to our being at home (or failing to be at home) in the world."